Wiretapping Millions Makes Terrorists Harder To Find?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Technology, The War On Terrorism
Well, I wouldn’t pose the question if the answer was no.
It’d be one thing if the NSA’s massive sweep of our phone records was actually helping catch terrorists. But what if it’s not working at all? A leading practitioner of the kind of analysis the NSA is supposedly performing in this surveillance program says that “it’s a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free.”[…[
So I called Valdis Krebs, who’s considered by many to be the leading authority on social network analysis — the art and science of finding the important connections in a seemingly-impenetrable mass of data. His analysis of the social network surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is a classic in the field.
Here’s what Krebs had to say about the newly-revealed NSA program that aims to track “every call ever made”: “If you’re looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“Certain people are more suspicious than others,” he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. “So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don’t have a cell. Because if one was there, you’d find some clustering. You don’t have to collect all the data in the world to do that.”
Now, there are other opinions on this, and the Defense Tech article has a couple. But those opinions advocate the “Google” method, which is getting everything. Yes…everything. Are we really ready for that?
Actually I am. Yes, let me say here and now, I’d love for all my communications to go through the magical terrorism catching machine. And while they’re at it, please, take a look at all my purchases and emails and blog posts. Of course, let’s put a few cameras in my house too. Just to make sure nothing untoward is going on. Oh, and let’s not forget the toilet cam. You never know what nefarious things are going down in the loo.
Because hey, if I don’t have anything to hide, why would I mind? Why would any of us? Don’t you want to catch the terrorists?
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 and is filed under Technology, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 11th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
“Certain people are more suspicious than others.” He’s right, but you do realize what he’s talking about here, don’t you?
May 11th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Well, it thought I did until you asked that question? What are you getting at?
However, if I’ve understood him correctly, that’s why the Google approach is not only incredibly dangerous to our civil liberties, it’s also worthless to round up all the data.
May 12th, 2006 at 4:50 am
So we’re cool with “profiling” now? Because almost all of “those people” are going to be Muslims and darker-skinned Asians.
May 12th, 2006 at 5:31 am
“Certain people are more suspicious than others,â€Â? he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance.”
is it really profiling if you are starting from a known, It seems juvenile to assume that because you are looking at people who are involved in suspicious activity, but happen to be in a minority by race or religion (and remember that minority is relative) that profiling must be going on. If you had to look at every person who went into a store over a 45 hour period to find the hybrid fuscia person who robbed the store would it still make sense. I understand that civil libertys are being abused by the idea of profiling, but are you honestly telling me its better that we abuse everyone rather monitering people with observed involvement in suspicious activities?
May 12th, 2006 at 6:33 am
I have nothing to hide. Why don’t I let the NSA put a camera up my rectum so he can evaluate my diet as well? I can hook it up to a website so anyone can watch it live. After all, I have nothing to hide.
May 12th, 2006 at 9:51 am
I think the failure modes on this endeavor are horrible so I’m not in favor of it but “making the haystack bigger” is simply not what’s going on. If you’re looking at analyzing calls for non-traditional terrorists, sleeper cells, and independent terrorists that have been created by reading primary texts, the haystack *is* all calls.
My read on this is that we’ve got enough CPU cycles sitting idle waiting for data to analyze that they’re throwing bigger and bigger datasets at the analysis machines in order to see if anything useful pops up.
Unfortunately, this technology, if they ever get it working right, would make it nearly impossible to organize resistance to a president that turned illegitimate. Unfortunately, the long-term dangers mean that we need to limit the use of such techniques in a war where we are not up against the wall of extermination.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:35 am
When he says certain people, he’s referring to people who travel back and forth from places like Afghanistan. And yes, it’s quite likely they’re more likely to be darker skinned muslims. That’s just kind of how it goes. I was never patently opposed to profiling when you have other things to back it up, like travel and associations with other known terrorists. And honestly, at that point, is it really profiling? Doesn’t seem like it.
But so-called “random” screenings in airports and the like ARE profiling and a waste of peoples’ time and energy.
May 12th, 2006 at 11:01 am
It is an indication of the sad state of political discourse in our country when the best argument for a supposedly very important survellience program is that those with nothing to hide won’t be bothered by it.
The only reason, IMO, that the Bushies haven’t found a compromise solution to this issue is because it polls well for them. I hope we all realize that Bush can stop this “controversy” any time he wants. If Dubya went to Congress and asked them to update FISA so this program could be done lawfully and with some minor oversight I think they would do it in a heartbeat. Instead we get to argue about this because it might help Bush’s poll numbers.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
When he peeks in your kitchen window do you begin to get annoyed?
On profiling …. it is beyond the pale to think that one should be upset that we take a close look at travellers of mid-eastern descent, but be ok with our government AND the folks we pay for our com services to compile super databases. Um, what is the principle behind cascading queries? Select Queries? Neural software for databases? The word profile comes to mind … why would we be “ok” with secret profiling of masses of citizenry and angered by the physical profiling of a select group with a history? Doesn’t seem to add up to me.